


Memories of Red and Winter

by xvalkyrieofodin



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Natasha Romanoff - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4138956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xvalkyrieofodin/pseuds/xvalkyrieofodin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has asked Wanda to help her recover some of the memories the Red Room has stripped from her.  Visions of deadly ballerinas and rigorous training dance through her mind as Wanda tugs at her strings.  During this process, she finds that she has more ties in her past to the Winter Soldier, than she thought before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was written for the Natasha Romanoff Mini Bang, and I wrote it as sort of a prologue for the Big Bang piece I'll be working on over the Summer. Stay tuned in September for more. :)

“Are you sure about this?” Wanda asked for the third time since they gathered in this small room.

Natasha lifted her gaze to Wanda, and her lips pursed out slightly as she gave Wanda a firm nod in response. Natasha’s eyes fell away almost immediately, drifting to the floor, her mind heavy with the memories disturbed the first time they did this. It’s not that she’s worried, just overwhelmed. In the short time that Wanda’s been on the team, the young woman has been nothing but kind and capable. 

Natasha can’t help but see bits of herself in the girl, parallels both between their backgrounds, their loss and how they came to join this team. They both set out for blood but found something else entirely. A home. A family. 

She glanced over to Steve, who stood to her left. Steve held his arms up in a half hearted surrender.

“I’m with her, Nat. I don’t think this is a good idea, I mean look what happened last time.” He offered.

Captain America, the man you can always count on to be the voice of reason in impossible situations. It was part of why she liked Steve, he’d let her do what she pleased and support her as she did, but he wasn’t afraid to share his honest opinion either. 

Clint leaned against the wall in the corner, encompassed in a slight shadow. Though they rarely admitted it, he was the anchor of the Avengers, the heart. His vulnerability and dedication despite it inspired the best of them, it was all that and more that caused her to change her path years ago. To become one of the good guys, or at least, a better person. 

Natasha had always worried there were gaps in her memory, that the Red Room stole so much more from her than her innocence and the ability to have children. Now she hoped that with Wanda’s help she could regain some of that. Even now, as her eyes searched the floor for answers, her mind is filled with the past and the path that has led her here.

At first she thought she was holding onto the memory of Bruce, holding on to the idea of him, the idea of running away with him. She had welcomed the chance to abandon the life she had dipped in regret and red. Maybe that was why she watched and waited for signs of him, because she thought escaping this life would give them both a chance to find what happened on the horizon, beyond the world of monsters and mayhem. 

And then it hit her…

She could never outrun who she was, what they made her. Somewhere deep, Natasha knew her training and her kills were as much a part of her as her blood, like it was written in the depths of her DNA now. Natasha was a carefully crafted weapon and memories she had long repressed kept pushing to the surface, since Wanda triggered visions of her past.

“I know I’m still missing things, I need to remember. I want to remember all of it.” She said to all three of them, the final confirmation of her intentions.

In the past few weeks it had gotten worse, she would wake up in pools of sweat, screaming and thrashing. Some of the images in her nightmares had felt so real, while others made little sense at all, but still left her terrified. A cobbled reel of gruesome murders and macabre missions. 

There was one constant in most of these flashbacks, a man with dark hair and warm eyes. Or at least, she remembered them to be warm some of the time. Other times she can remember them like steel, strong and piercing, cold and calculating. Those were the eyes he looked at others with. When his eyes were on here, the warmth flooded them again, like the brief Soviet summers she remembered as a child. A fleeting and lovely affection.

She has tried as hard as she can, but Natasha cannot remember his face. It is always blurry and misshapen in her dreams, as if he was in an oil painting and someone swirled a brush around his features. 

“You should sit down. Just in case.” Wanda said as she gestured to the chair in front of her. 

All of Natasha’s weapons were discarded, locked away in another part of the facility. She wasn’t sure how much difference that truly made.

She was a weapon all on her own. She did not need a gun or knives to end a life.

They all knew the risk here though, so much of her training was based on muscle memory. Natasha worried that if she even had so much as a paper clip on her person, it could end badly. The Avengers in the room were capable, but the Black Widow was quick, especially in close quarters. 

Natasha settled into the seat, her back straightened with a practice grace. She could see Wanda’s fingertips with her peripheral vision, but she kept her gaze forward on the empty wall in front of her. Moments passed and she shifted to turn and ask Wanda what she was waiting for, only to find herself alone in the room. Wanda was gone and Clint was with her, and Natasha realized this time she would aware of the images that danced around her. Unlike last time, where it all felt like some twisted nightmare, one that felt so very real.

She turned to face forward again, but the wall that had been there before was now gone. In it’s place, she again saw the graceful ballerina’s, twirling, before her. The familiar click of the metronome and classical music filled the air around her, and it caused Natasha to want to join them. Her body knew the steps, and the remembrance of what she had once been called out to her. She moved forward, walking among the dancers. No, not dancers. Agents, products of the Red Room, like her. 

When she can no longer ignore the need, she begins to dance alongside them. The music moves through her, and she spins and twirls and dips and rises, again and again. She can hear the tempo growing, building to a crescendo and she moves quickly along with it, doing her best to keep up. Just when the just is about to crest, she feels someone collide with her and he knocks her to the floor. 

When she recovers and looks up, he is her sky. Over and above her. Menacing and comforting all at the same time, but his face is still distorted.

“Get up, and this time do not falter, Natalia.” He scolds her in Russian.

She recognizes that voice. She knows that voice. 

She can only remember him speaking to her once before, and technically his words weren’t really for her. They were for Steve. For a moment she tries to convince herself that it could not be true, that it must have been the blood loss from her wound distorting her memory. 

She stays on the ground, but looks up at him with a narrowed gaze. 

“Bucky?” 

She intended it to come out a statement, but the question weaves it’s way onto her lips in a vulnerable way that makes her uncomfortable. She is an agent of the Red Room, their most skilled assassin, there is no room for uncertainty in her training.

“Who the Hell is Bucky?” 

He replies in English, but it she knows it’s her memories playing tricks on her, echoing the words she heard him say before. They are parroting and replaying the scene he had with Steve, aren’t they? 

His face comes into clear view then, and she knows she is not mistaken. She can remember the training sessions with him, and something more than that, though the details are still fuzzy as they flood back all at once. 

She was the prime jewel of the Red Room, the most deadly assassin they had seen in years. They could not replicate the Winter Soldier, so the next best thing of course, was to have him teach her. It did not take long for her to see the cracks in his programming, the far off look he would get when she practiced her English with him. She moves to stand and face him again, but before they can start sparring again, she is pulled out, suddenly and violently, from the world Wanda crafted in her mind. 

When she comes back to her senses, she immediately bursts up from the chair and spins to face Wanda in a fluid motion.

“Why did you pull me out? I was getting somewhere!” She demands with misdirected anger.

She can feel Clint’s hand on her shoulder before she sees him next to her. He’s holding her back, anchoring her. It’s something they’ve both done for each other in the past, they each ground each other when things spin out of control.

“Because I told her to. You kept muttering, ‘I know him. I know him.’ and each time you sounded more and more distressed, Nat. You told me to stop it when I thought it went too far. I did.” Clint answers.

“Who is he?” Wanda asks in her slightly accented English.

Natasha’s gaze falls again as all the anger drains out of her in nearly an instant. 

“The Winter Soldier. I thought--I thought the first time I ever came across him was in Odessa, I figured that was why he gunned for me when we came across him again. He had a score to settle with me. I was a loose end, but now…” Natasha presses her eyes closed, a somewhat useless effort to clear her mind and sort through the details.

“Leviathan failed, but the Red Room lived on, through Hydra. He trained me, and...I think I knew he was an American. Or I figured it out.” 

“Are you still on his trail?” Clint asked as he turned to look over at Steve.

“I’ve cleared out every remainder of Hydra I can find, a lot of it has been dead end after dead end.” Steve answered honestly. “They’re pretty busy destroying the evidence though, of everything they’ve done, the factions that are left.

Natasha’s jaw clenched as she thought about the whole situation. “We’re not going to find him, not unless he wants to be found. He’s as good as I am…” She paused and pushed out a breath that would have sounded like a sigh, if someone was listening closely enough.

“...Maybe better.”

She could see the gravity of that statement sink into both Steve and Clint’s features. Natasha openly admitted the Winter Soldier was likely more deadly than she was, but now he was without his support system, now he would have to put his training to use. Going to ground and disappearing was about putting all the skills they had learned to a different purpose, blending in with the explicit goal of not being found. This was not slinking around in the shadows to find a target, this was about survival.

“We need to call for backup then, get Fury to use whatever resources he has left.” Clint said and turned to leave, but Natasha caught his sleeve in a quick motion.

“No. I want to gear up, and head out. I assume you’re coming with?” Natasha quirked a brow upward at Steve and he nodded in a firm but grim fashion to show he planned to accompany here.

Another wave of memories hit her, harder than she expected them to. Bucky’s smile as he watched her dance, the shot firing and the slug catching her in the stomach and killing the man she meant to protect, sparring with him, learning how he moved as they trained together. She shook her head, still trying to deal with the new memories attempting to fill her mind. “It’s going to take me some time to make sense of all this, and I can do that as well flying a quinjet as anywhere else.”

“Where are you gonna go?” Wanda asked.

“Russia. That is where this started, and I think it maybe where it’s going to end.” She started for the door but offered them one last glance back in their direction. 

It was time to return to her long abandoned home and she knew that would stir up even more memories than had already been unburied. It was of no matter though.

The Black Widow no longer ran from her past. This would be no different. 

It was time to go home.


	2. This fic continued in "The Hunt for the Winter Soldier"

I just wanted to let you all know that this story will be continued in my story "The Hunt for the Winter Soldier"  
Please check it out! :)  
http://archiveofourown.org/works/4617003


End file.
